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LJ fan communities vs tumblr
Nov. 29th, 2015 01:11 pmThe thing I really miss about LJ fan communities vs living on a tag is the ability to navigate posts. So many posts intro on tumblr with "not sure if this has been done yet", because there's no way to establish precedence and fannish history with a feed.
Did LJ have a feed-like queue of posts from various members of the community? Sure! But with a consciencious mod, we also had post tags for fanart, prompts, headcanons, aus. Apart from a stronger messaging system (and a way to identify unique people who change their usernames [though, if you want to establish yourself in a fandom, I don't know why would you change your name]), that's the thing I miss most.
I think having an open searchable method of navigating posts also eases tension on fanwork creators who are afraid their content will be forgotten or stolen, because it's pushed to the bottom of the tag stack and only sees the light of day if it's redistributed into people's feeds via reblogs.
I see a bunch of prompts and art ideas, fic ideas, meta, that is rehashed over and over because the people who have similar train of thought can't find each other's content, which is a real shame. I think we have to figure out a way to make fandom more collaborative instead of consumerist, which is really difficult with how the tumblr UI is structured. If I'm off tumblr for a while, I feel like I miss out on content that will be gone forever from my sight once I come back, because finding it requires going through every post on a tag.
Anyway, I dunno, I feel like we all have this reaction whenever a fandom communication platform changes, so maybe this is just me being like "ohh you young fandom platforms" or whatever.
Did LJ have a feed-like queue of posts from various members of the community? Sure! But with a consciencious mod, we also had post tags for fanart, prompts, headcanons, aus. Apart from a stronger messaging system (and a way to identify unique people who change their usernames [though, if you want to establish yourself in a fandom, I don't know why would you change your name]), that's the thing I miss most.
I think having an open searchable method of navigating posts also eases tension on fanwork creators who are afraid their content will be forgotten or stolen, because it's pushed to the bottom of the tag stack and only sees the light of day if it's redistributed into people's feeds via reblogs.
I see a bunch of prompts and art ideas, fic ideas, meta, that is rehashed over and over because the people who have similar train of thought can't find each other's content, which is a real shame. I think we have to figure out a way to make fandom more collaborative instead of consumerist, which is really difficult with how the tumblr UI is structured. If I'm off tumblr for a while, I feel like I miss out on content that will be gone forever from my sight once I come back, because finding it requires going through every post on a tag.
Anyway, I dunno, I feel like we all have this reaction whenever a fandom communication platform changes, so maybe this is just me being like "ohh you young fandom platforms" or whatever.
